Across the western
democracies, the centre of political gravity shifts erratically but
inexorably to the right. Britain’s Brexit vote caused a tilt to the
right in Theresa May’s cabinet and has been followed by the
election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress in America. This
weekend, Austrians may elect a far-right president, while the
centre-left Italian government could fall after this Sunday’s
constitutional referendum. In France, meanwhile, the centre-right
Republican party has now selected the more conservative contender
François Fillon as its presidential candidate in the 2017 contest
that could end as a head-to-head with the far-right Front National’s
Marine Le Pen.

It is a mistake to
treat these developments as simply interchangeable. Every country has
its own local political dynamics. Mr Fillon, for example, is
routinely depicted as an admirer of Margaret Thatcher – a charge
that will be trumpeted by opponents between now and April. But his
focus on France’s Catholic roots puts him in a long tradition of
French conservatism which has no real equivalent in Britain. His
politics are not the same as those of Mrs May, who is again sharply
different from Mr Trump. The new Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, who took
over from Nigel Farage today, is not Britain’s Ms Le Pen either.

Nevertheless, these
developments across the western world have significant ingredients in
common and reflect an overlapping mood among western voters. These
include job insecurity in the face of globalisation, hostility to
migration, anger against urban elites, fear of terrorism, and in some
cases a more indulgent stance towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mr
Fillon, moreover, has rocketed into frontrunner status to be France’s
next president without the media seeing him coming – another echo
of the collective misreadings that marked both the referendum vote
for Brexit and the Trump election win.

Mr Fillon’s rise
sends a particularly resonant further signal. He spent the past three
years touring France to listen to rightwing voters’ concerns. He
then harnessed this experience to a hardline campaign for a strict
minimum level of immigration, the restoration of Catholic
conservative values, an overhaul of labour laws and a big cut in
public sector jobs. The result was that Mr Fillon swept to an
overwhelming two-to-one victory over his chief rival, the more
moderate Alain Juppé, defeating him in 92 of France’s 95
departments. Both men are former prime ministers, but it was Mr
Juppé, not Mr Fillon, who was seen by voters as campaigning from
within an establishment bubble. The loser’s promises to “placate
and reform” and promising a “happy identity” found few takers
in a French nation that has failed to unify convincingly against
either economic decline or radical terror.

The ability of the
centre-right to respond to and shape the world as it is evolving in
2016 contrasts with the inability of the centre-left to make matching
responses. This failure is also simultaneously particular to
individual countries and shared across borders. France’s left
politics provide a textbook example. With occasional exceptions, like
Canada and Portugal, the centre-left has struggled to win recent
elections on both sides of the Atlantic. France’s left suffers from
being part of that more general international difficulty to
articulate an alternative that catches the popular mood and from
being a particularly acute local example of that failure.

France’s
socialists have little time to solve their problems before planned
primaries in January. But the signs are not good. François Hollande
has been neither a radical reformer nor a leftwing traditionalist. He
has been indecisive and is increasingly the despair of both wings of
his movement. He is now the least popular president since the fifth
republic was formed. Polling suggests he will fail to get through the
first round of the two-stage presidential election if he runs for a
second term.

Already, a spread of
alternative candidates is emerging, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the
left of the socialists to Emmanuel Macron in the centre. At the
weekend, prime minister Manuel Valls hinted at a run too. Mr Hollande
may decide, even so, that Mr Fillon’s success opens a space in
which his own chances may improve. Yet any of them will struggle to
unify a majority now. The danger is that the fragmentation and
incoherence on the left are too deep. Yet without a credible
candidate on the left, French voters will face a baleful choice
between the mainstream right and the far right. That’s a problem
for France above all, but it reflects a much wider failure too.

How
François Fillon plans to knock out Marine Le Pen

His
camp plans to expose National Front leader as a ‘false
conservative’ and go after her blue-collar voters.

PARIS — With
former Prime Minister François Fillon on his way to the French
presidential election next year, his staff is turning to the next big
obstacle in their path: far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Polls show Le Pen,
the head of the National Front, breaking through to the presidential
election’s runoff round, setting the stage for a clash between the
two.

Fillon staffers have
yet to lay out a detailed plan for how to deal with Le Pen, but
several campaign staffers told POLITICO they are already strategizing
about the battle to come. The broad outlines of their plan: expose Le
Pen as a “false conservative,” go after her blue-collar voters
and remind the world of her lack of executive experience.

“In the next few
months, we are going to continue to campaign on our values and tell
the truth about the economy,” said Serge Grouard, a center-right MP
and Fillon backer. “We’re confident that voters will make the
choice of realism, instead of the escapism being served by the
Front.”

To be sure, the path
to the presidency for Fillon is long and winding. Over the next six
months, the conservative flag-bearer will need to broaden his message
to centrist voters while also fending off attacks from the Left,
which holds its own primary in January.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
a hard-left presidential candidate, and whoever the center-left
designates as its candidate, as well as the National Front are all
sure to accuse Fillon of trying to dismantle France’s cherished
welfare state while giving tax breaks to companies. Despite the
unpopularity on the Left of his plans to lay off as many as 500,000
civil servants and scrap the 35-hour work week, his camp is confident
that his underlying message of tough-love reform and social
conservatism will carry him to the election’s final round.

And they see a
variety of ways of shrinking the appeal of the National Front, whose
presence in the election’s final round Fillon has said is “not
determined by fate.”

The ‘Right’
Choice

For Fillon’s camp,
one way to knock the National Front off balance will be to challenge
its political identity.

Their own candidate
won more than 60 percent of the vote against a more moderate
candidate by focusing on social values, winning the support of
Catholic groups and projecting exactly who he is: an economic liberal
and social conservative who, at the end of the day, is indisputably
right-wing.

Le Pen, by contrast,
is full of ambiguities. Is she a right-winger who happens to have
sympathy for left-wing ideas? Or is she a socialist who happens to
hate immigration and the European Union?

The National Front
leader will have no good answers to such questions for a simple
reason: Le Pen’s pitch to voters that she is merely a patriot
beyond Left and Right marks her out as an opportunist who has exposed
herself to attacks as a “rootless sovereignist,” Fillon’s camp
said.

“Voters often
choose Le Pen because there is no clear conservative candidate
available to them,” said Grouard. “We’re going to give them a
candidate with clear views who tells the truth about the economy.”

Fillon, 62, has also
promised a crackdown on immigration and has taken a tough rhetorical
stance on Islam, promising a closer relationship with Moscow in order
to destroy what he has called “totalitarian” Islamists. An avowed
Catholic, he is against abortion, gay marriage and surrogacy.

Such positions
helped Fillon win the support of a Catholic current of the
Républicains party named “Sens Commun,” which organized between
400 and 500 meetings for him. Over the next six months, Sens Commun
plans to broaden and deepen its efforts in favor of Fillon.

When
it comes to traditional conservative voters, Fillon currently holds
an advantage.

By contrast, Le
Pen’s camp believes that economic arguments, based on
disenchantment with the EU, will continue to resonate widely. Coupled
with the party’s tough attitude on immigration, the National Front
still sees itself riding to power in 2017 on a similar wave to the
one that carried Donald Trump to victory in the U.S. presidential
election.

But there is no
denying that when it comes to traditional conservative voters, Fillon
currently holds an advantage.

While Le Pen also
wants gay marriage repealed, she never attended the “Manif Pour
Tous” rallies meant to topple the bill. As National Front
president, she is more comfortable discussing economic issues or the
European Union than religion or identity. The choice reflects the
thinking of her vice president, Florian Philippot, who is the
architect of the National Front’s anti-euro agenda and has
repeatedly pushed back against attempts, from other cadres, to make
the party’s platform more traditionally right-wing on societal
matters.

None of this has won
her many friends among Catholics, who voted massively for Fillon on
Sunday.

Marine’s niece,
Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, is more favored by Catholic conservatives.
But the 26-year-old is not running for president, and her influence
within the National Front appears to be waning, possibly by choice.
This week, Marion called Fillon a “dangerous” candidate for the
Front, while Marine said she would be happy to face him in a runoff
round.

Working class hero

Another pillar of
the anti-Le Pen strategy will be to puncture her claim to be the
choice of the little guy — the working class voter, the farmer and
the young unemployed.

Hours after Fillon’s
victory Sunday, Philippot went on television to assail Fillon as a
cold-hearted agent of capitalism, saying his plans to lay off 500,000
civil sector workers would “bleed” France. His calls for reform
of labor rules were further “austerity” directed from Brussels
and embrace of the EU was proof of his “savage globalism,”
Philippot said.

“The candidate of
uncontrolled globalization has a name: François Fillon,” Philippot
told BFMTV. “His program is rather medieval in nature: he wants to
bleed France to make it better, even though we know this doesn’t
work very well.”

But Fillon’s camp
argue they can siphon off Le Pen’s working class votes. They point
to exceptionally strong performances in some economically depressed
areas where the National Front usually does well as proof that Le Pen
does not have a lock on “Trump-like” voters. In the northern
Pas-de-Calais area where Marine Le Pen tried, and failed, to win a
regional presidency last December, Fillon won 73.1 percent of the
vote. Along the eastern border with Germany, where Philippot’s MEP
constituency is based, Fillon clocked more than 70 percent of the
vote in some places.

Even in the south,
where ardor for the FN is strongest, Fillon got huge wins. He scooped
up 74.1 percent of the vote in the Vaucluse department, where
Marion-Maréchal-Le Pen is an MP, and 74.4 percent in the only other
region where the party has an MP, the Gard.

Of course the
centrist and conservative primary, which drew around 4 million
voters, is no model for the general election in which more than 40
million are expected to vote. But Fillon’s side argues that the
primary does offer some lessons. One is that National Front voters —
thousands of whom voted for Fillon in the both rounds of the primary
— can and will be stolen.

“Fillon is not
going to leave Marine Le Pen with a monopoly on working class
voters,” said another Fillon aide who asked not to be named. “These
are very smart, very hardworking people. They can tell the difference
between economic realism and nonsense. Given the choice, they will
make the right decision.”

To win over more
blue-collar support, Fillon is going to hammer home plans to raise
employment, boost vocational training and increase the number of
apprenticeships, the aide added.

Steady hands

Finally, there is
the question of executive experience. Philippot and other National
Front officials have tried to paint Fillon’s four decades as part
of the establishment as a problem, arguing that he is no different
than former President Nicolas Sarkozy. But while Fillon did spend
five years of a notoriously obedient term as Sarkozy’s prime
minister, conservative rival Alain Juppé tried to paint Fillon with
that brush during the primaries to no effect.

On the contrary,
Fillon’s experience in office was consistently cited as an
advantage by poll respondents. In surveys of viewers after TV
debates, Fillon consistently rated highly on “competence” and
“economics.”

With that in mind,
Fillon’s campaign is likely to highlight the difference between
their candidate and Le Pen, who has run no larger organization than
her political party.

“When it comes to
running a country’s economy, to making decisions on foreign policy
crises, to steering the boat — you want someone who knows what they
are doing,” said Grouard.